(Excerpt from Lindsay's July 2007 "Letter Home"-- read more about Lindsay's SOL project in her full portfolio) 

I sigh to myself, but as the only teacher at my school who doesn't use a stick to discipline the students, I don't have many options. So I keep writing, tracing the question "What is peace?" on the board.

Part of my work with RESPECT this summer includes teaching in one of the organization's partner schools-the Fundamental Baptist School, where "Discipline Precedes Success." In my Peace Education and Creative Writing classes, I gain a taste of what "typical" schools are in the community. It's quite a counterpoint to the SMART Kids program I volunteer with, which only deals with the most motivated students from each school on the camp. Teaching in a "normal" school tends to cast a shadow on my activities with SMART Kids, however, because I realize just how little my lovely enrichment program changes.

It's a feeling that every volunteer probably has at some point-the realization that the challenges facing your community are overwhelmingly, dishearteningly large and interconnected. Poverty-leads-to-improper-sanitation-leads-to-disease-leads-to-poor-education-outcomes-leads-to-teen-pregnancy - and so on. In the case of Fundamental Baptist, the issues that lead students to miss school and score poorly on national exams are various and vicious. Many of the sixth-grade girls are mothers already, which isn't as startling when you realize that most 6th-graders are 15 or 16. On most days, only about half of the students in a class show up at school, kept home by lack of school fees, the illness of a parent, or the fact that many children work jobs outside school to earn enough money for their families. When they do come, few students have pens and paper, and even fewer actually write anything, which is more understandable when you're so close to your neighbor that you can't move around, or when you haven't eaten since the previous day.

That community issues are interconnected isn't a new insight-it's a much-discussed challenge in my public policy and global health classes. When you're "in the field," however, this realization carries a different weight than it does from the comfy cushioned chairs and conference rooms of the Sanford Institute. It becomes heavier, unavoidable, no longer anecdotal. It poisons your work because it exhausts your energy, and can destroy your motivation if you allow it to. In a university classroom, it is other people's programs that must be connected and coordinated. But in the field, it's your own time, effort, passion and energy that seem absolutely fruitless unless combined with the time, effort, passion and energy of other volunteers, each working on a different, but equally important, challenge.

Although I firmly believe in the importance of the program I'm involved with, after my teaching experiences I grow very discouraged. Perhaps I can give 40 curious kids some really great memories, and hopefully some useful advice on public speaking, leadership, and geography, which are some of the topics our weekly workshops cover. But how can I deal with the other obstacles these students are facing-school fees, family problems, and endemic disease? I want to lock them in a box when they arrive each Saturday and keep them there until the week is over again.

Yet I'm teaching these kids about youth leadership and empowerment-I even have a segment called "The Power of You" in an upcoming youth conference I'm helping to plan. How do I in good faith tell students to empower themselves when I feel most powerless? There's an odd schizophrenia between what I'm saying and what I'm thinking.

I know that one objective of the SOL program is to engender agency among its students in difficult situations. But there are honestly some issues which I can't solve here. In some ways, I feel that I understand completely what it must be to be a refugee- the overwhelming frustration that you can't do anything, even about things that affect the most visceral parts of your existence. I can't control withdrawal of food aid by the UNHCR, or the corrupt camp officials who extract bribes from NGOs, and I have no recourse for the smell of sewage that follows me on my walks around camp.

So I suspect the SOL program's objective is more complex: to teach its students how to affect the situations they can change, and how to cope with the frustration of those they can't. The oft-quoted adage "God grant me the strength to change those situations, the patience to accept those I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference" is applicable here. That saying is printed on a sheet that hangs in my host family's house, and they are perhaps the best example of it.

My host mother is a registrar at the school where I teach. She desperately wants to travel to America, particularly because of the business opportunities she thinks she'll find there. But she hasn't yet had a successful interview, so she decided to take her family-her husband, two daughters, niece, and nephew-back to Liberia in December. She knows she can't control the U.S. immigration policy, so instead she's focused on what she can do to save or raise the $75 necessary to buy a generator, which will be used to power the water distribution business she wants to open upon her return. Listening to her plan and muse about business opportunities in Liberia, I'm reminded that one of my skills in this community is to question and analyze. Sometimes analysis is good, as it is in her assessment of markets in post-war Liberia. But sometimes the analysis becomes paralyzing; searching for causes and effects, and especially solutions, leads you in a circle that only ends in frustration, particularly for my short stay here.

So sometimes-for your sanity as well as your success-you have to take a leap of faith. You do your best to combat one or two challenges, and hope your efforts are part of a web that will be added to by other programs, individuals, and organizations-a web that will hopefully secure a better future for some group of people, but which is just as tenuous and uncertain as the spider webs in the corners of my classroom.